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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
51
Why the united Europe
enterprise must fail
US-style EU lacks rootedness in Western Europe, history, Christianity and popularity
ÝÃÊÄ&ÄĽ½
T
HE euro crisis that is exposing once-ex-
emplary Europe to worldwide disdain is
the beginning of the failure of the united-
Europe enterprise. I mean the enterprise
that went beyond the creation of a Western
Europe free-trade area to the construction of the
political entity or quasi-state that has its de facto
capital in Brussels.
That quasi-state is historically rootless. It
lacks even the minimal rootedness in history
which the Soviet Union possessed by compris-
ing the previously united territory and peoples
of the Russian Empire.
To this fundamental rootlessness the Brussels
quasi-state added by adopting as its operative
ideology (in the manner of the Soviet Union) an
ideology which was expressly directed against
historic Europe.
The Europe of history was a civilisation
founded in the eleventh century in Western Europe
and existing essentially there and in its overseas
colonies and ex-colonies until the twentieth.
A community of competing, occasionally war-
ring, eminently creative nations, it was bound
together by Latin Christianity and by laws that
derived from that religion or respected it. Its
nearest analogue in history was the community
of competing, occasionally warring, eminently
creative city-states, bound together by the reli-
gion of Zeus and periodic national festivals, which
we call Ancient Greece.
It was in those political and ideological forms,
respectively, that Ancient Greece impinged on and
led much of the world, and that Europe impinged
on and led the entire world. There could be no
repeating of them except as continuations of
them that retained their essential features. And
the Brussels quasi-state has prided itself precisely
on not being a continuation of the Europe of his-
tory, but something different from it and superior
to it.
The new, left-liberal ideology which the
Brussels quasi-state adopted was borrowed
from the American state of the 1960s-1970s.
It decried European civilisation as a radically
oppressive and unjust society requiring the amel-
iorative replacement which its programme of legal
innovations would supply. Because these innova-
tions, whatever their objective merit, cancelled
rules and customary behaviours intrinsic to the
thousand-year-old fabric of European civilisation,
‘replacement’ of the old fabric with a
new, post-European one is precisely
what occurred.
The Brussels bureaucracy, hav-
ing made this revolutionary ideology
its own, has worked assiduously to
implement it in one ordnance after
another directed to the member
states. As part of this construction
of a new, morally superior, post-
European society, it discarded
Christianity because that religion
gave sacral support to the essential
values and moral rules of historic
Europe.
A political-ideological construct
put together by politicians and
bureaucrats, and lacking historical
rootedness, stands on cracking ice.
If in addition it lacks rootedness in the hearts of
the people it is made for, it is doomed to a short
life. The Brussels quasi-state lacks that also.
Europeans had loved their nation-states as
their chief collective definers in the world. The
Brussels quasi-state proposed itself as a replace-
ment in that role, but its subjects have declined the
proposal. Far from loving the European Union as
their chief collective definer, they think, feel and
talk of it simply as ‘Brussels’.
There are several reasons for this. The Union’s
constructors and rulers did not exert themselves
to make it loveable; they assumed it sufficed to
make it – by its displayed concern for democracy,
the rights and equal treatment of all individuals,
the environment, health and safety and so on
– admirable.
For a community to be loved by its members as
their chief collective definer in the world, it must
honour values that distinguish it from other com-
parable communities. The EU honours the same
values as America. Again, the leaders of said com-
munity must respect some seminal values and
virtues of the people’s ancestors. Brussels disap-
proves of Europe’s ancestral values and virtues.
For a community, finally, to be loved by its
members, they need to know where its territory
begins and ends and feel that they have shared
a common history there. But the united-Europe
enterprise has developed from being a union of
West European nations who felt that
in a broad sense they had shared
a common history into something
different.
It has become a political union
of those Western Europeans with
a growing number of nations who
have shared a quite different his-
tory, in eastern and south-eastern
Europe. Robbing the word ‘Europe’ of
any clear or felt meaning, Brussels is
considering possible membership for
Turkey, Ukraine and Georgia. After
Eurovision in Baku we can expect its
insatiable grabber mentality to eye
the inclusion of Azerbaijan.
Ancient Greece showed how a
great civilisation, its work done, can
exit with dignity from history. After
it had been overrun by its large, compact neigh-
bour, Macedonia, a couple of regional leagues of
city-states emerged and lasted for a time. But all-
conquering Rome rolled over them and supervised
Ancient Greece’s twilight.
One can say ‘supervised’ because out of respect
for a cultural eminence that Rome revered, Roman
rule impinged lightly. It allowed the city-states to
run their local affairs, the all-Greek festivals con-
tinued. A good Roman education had to include
some time spent studying in Greece. It was not
a dishonourable sort of twilight for a great civi-
lisation.
Dr Desmond Fennell’s forthcoming book is Third
Stroke Did It: The Staggered End of Western
Civilisation. www.desmondfennell.com
Ancient Greece
showed
how a great
civilisation,
its work done,
can exit with
dignity from
history
¨
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